$1.9 Million Lost by Southern Oregon University in an email fraud

Unknown suspects allegedly posed as Andersen Construction in an email, prompting officers to send their spring payment to a checking account the contractor didn’t control, per Mark Denney, SOU’s vice chairman of budget and planning.

The university wired the payment the last week of april, consistent with sou spokesperson Joe Mosley. regarding 3business days later, the construction company rumored it never received payment.

Local, state and federal authorities were notified right away when the fraud was discovered, Denney said. an FBIinvestigation was launched and efforts by the university are presently afoot on multiple fronts to recover any and every one losses.

“It’s actually a considerable quantity,” Mosley said. “It’s never all of the cash that was transferred, however it’s not simply nickels and dimes, either.”

“We’re hoping that it will,” Mosley said.

FBI Portland Bureau representative beth Anne steele couldn’t speak on the open investigation, however sametypically that the supposed Business Email Compromise scam has been spreading, additional recently setting its sights on tiny and medium-size businesses. The scam racked up over $5 billion in losses or tried losses worldwide between October 2013 and December 2016, consistent with a might 23 FBI release.

The FBI on may five alerted universities with the warning: “Many universities are oftentimes engaged in massiveconstruction projects that need regular electronic payments of a minimum of several hundred thousand bucks. it’scomparatively straightforward for a criminal to spot the development firms concerned in these comes and use social engineering and e-mail spoofing to commit this kind of fraud. As a results of the character and enormous size of those payments to a construction company, losses are important.”

Denney said there’s no indication that the fraud was internal, or that the fraud concerned anyone related to Andersen.

Recovering the accessible funds isn’t immediate, Mosley said, saying there’s a “process we’ve got to go through.”

As for the rest of the cash lost, Mosley said it’s not nevertheless known whether or not the university’s insurance firm covers fraud.